MLB 13: The Show VitaReview

Lots of baseball teams look great on paper and have killer off-seasons, only to disappoint once the games start counting. (The 2012 Marlins, anyone?) Likewise, at least on paper, the Vita version of MLB 13: The Show matches up nicely with its big PS3 brother – a fantastic baseball sim any fan of the sport should take a long, hard look at. All of the marquee goodies are included in the Vita version, from the take-your-created-player-from-the-minors-to-the-majors Road to the Show mode (and its handy 2013 improvements, like pressing L1 to pick up your third-base coach and R1 to follow the ball as you run the bases) to throwing-strength meters on defense to the new Postseason and The Show Live modes. So too are all of the detailed animations, including each player’s unique batting stance or pitching windup, as well as their excellent player faces.

It plays similarly too, which is to say “like Justin Verlander on a good day.” The balance between hitting and pitching is just right – it’s neither too easy nor too hard to hit home runs, and it’s not too simple or too tough to strike out every batter. Even defense is now fun thanks to the aforementioned user-controlled throwing system.

Despite underwhelming visuals overall, player faces and animations are convincing.

The handheld and console editions even interact a bit. Cross-buy is sadly omitted – you’ll have to pay twice for what is, under the hood, the same game – but you can upload your save file to the cloud and take your Franchise, Road to the Show, Season, or Postseason progress on the road with you and then back home again. A mostly pointless cross-play on Home Run Derby mode is here, allowing you to duel with friends or randoms over PlayStation Network to see who can muscle more baseballs out of the stadium. (Missed opportunity: a minigame of evading PED tests for extra points.)

In practice, MLB 13 for Vita a good full-console game trapped in a handheld that can’t quite match its grand ambitions. Or, to put it another way, MLB 13 on Vita feels more like a ported-over PS2 game than a downscaled PS3 game. The framerate is fine, but just a tick below smooth – just enough to be noticeable. Worse, the extremely tight Vita thumbsticks make aiming pitches a chore; where I prefer the Pulse Pitching option when on the mound in the PS3 version, it’s prohibitively difficult to have fun that way on the handheld. I recommend the copied-straight-from-MVP-Baseball option labeled Meter, which strikes a balance between being fun to use and allowing enough chance for user error that it still feels realistic.

Home Run Derby is cross-playable online between Vita and PS3. So yeah...

Finally, a number of presentation sacrifices have been made, either to speed up the pace of the game for the handheld hardware, or out of technical necessity. I saw glitches like players clipping through one another in the field, and dugouts that appear empty until suddenly everyone blinks in as my player got close enough to home plate. Ballparks, meanwhile, have accurate details, but won’t exactly beat Kate Upton in any beauty contests. And most of the cutscenes and replays have been excised, speeding up the pace of play but removing most of the TV-broadcast feel in the process.

The Verdict

Still, this is a baseball sim that, to be as clear as BALCO ointment, plays very, very well. Hitting, fielding, and pitching (provided you opt for the Meter option) all feel great, and Road to the Show in particular is both difficult to put down and perfectly suited to the portable format, since each game takes 5 to 10 minutes to zip through. MLB 13: The Show on Vita is the Oakland A’s of video game baseball: they play in a crummy stadium (the Vita), but when you look past that, they’re pretty damn good.